Holistic Horrors: Poetry & Wellness

Trigger Warning:
This article addresses mental health.

This month on Holistic Horrors we take a brief look at the role of poetry in promoting well-being and connectiveness. Numerous studies suggest that this is the case. For example, in their 2018 study examining the value of writing poetry as a “means to help people living with chronic pain to explore and express their narratives in their own unique way”, researchers Hovey, Khayat, and Feig concluded that “to write cathartic poetry means bringing into presence our inner reflective thinking, emotions, and self-empathy to help ourselves and others who suffer alongside us.” (Hovey et al., 2018, n.p.) HWA Wellness Committee member Angela Yuriko Smith, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Tortured Willows, is of the same mind. She says, “Writing is excellent therapy. It allows us to give voice to the unthinkable. We can tell our secret fears and desires to a trustworthy source that won’t judge us.”

In another study, Havard scholars Xiang and Yi conducted a series of virtual poetry workshops as a vehicle to help participants form meaningful social relationships. They claimed that participants consistently remarked on “the sense of belonging and community that the workshops provided, and how encouraged they were to speak and share their hopes and fears, their worries, and joys, and to feel a real connection to others, while learning and immersing themselves in poetry.” (Xiang & Yi, 2020, n.p.)

The authors went on to conclude that “reading poetry can provide solace and great hope to us, as it reaffirms our place in the world and, in those moments when we come across a poem or certain lines that strongly resonate with us, it is as if we are jolted with electricity at the sheer joy of knowing we can share a bond with someone who we may have never met.” (Xiang & Yi, 2020, n.p.)

Bram Stoker Award-winning poet and former HWA Poetry Showcase editor Stephanie M. Wytovich would agree, stating in a 2020 Litreactor article that “in poetry, specifically in horror, we’re able to reach out into darkness in hopes that understanding the shadows will shed light on our fears. It’s a way of taking what we’ve been told is our weakness and using it instead as a strength to create something beautiful, because in the end, when we write and allow ourselves to be open and honest, raw and susceptible, it creates a group of warriors and draws in other people who have also walked into the night and lived to tell the tale.”

Likewise, in the introduction to her debut collection, The Price of a Small Hot Fire, poet E.F. Schraeder writes, “Horror poetry, like other horror media, provides a path to explore what frightens us with a distance that affords safety. In the course of a few phrases and images, the horror poem invites readers through a variety of dangers and shattering losses, often with an unflinching clarity.”

So this month the HWA Wellness Committee is proud to bring you this selection of 14 exquisite dark poems—both original and reprints, including some award-nominated works—from nine exceptional poets, all of whom share their very personal perspectives on aspects of mental health. We hope these poems will inspire, inform, entertain, offer hope, and remind anyone who might be struggling right now that you are not alone.

A special thanks to our featured poets, L.E Daniels, Dave Jeffery, Celine Murray, Sumiko Saulson, Anton Cancre, Cindy O’Quinn, Angela Yuriko Smith, E.F. Schraeder, and Claire Fitzpatrick for sharing your poems with us. 

“Night Terrors” by L. E. Daniels

Shadows stretch late-afternoon-long to deep-solid-dark—

A mirror for your dread.

Often, themes repeat: fly from sleep, see your body, a gray rumple—

Oh-my-god-am-I-dead?

You strike the wall like a bird trapped and wake panting, bed empty.

You glance down the hall at children asleep.

Your husband, the night owl awake, calls out: You’re OK. He’s used to this. 

You’re not.

Maybe it’s smoke—a rolling black canopy overhead; DayGlo orange wicks up walls. 

Flying, you wake racing down the hall 

Set to carry children from a smokeless house, two at once.

You hear again,

You’re OK. He’s used to this. 

You’re not.

Turn off the bedside lamp:

A pill knocks you down a hole saved for must-have nights,

But this medicated troll snaps at children over breakfast, and eventually, you fly anyway.

Pills journey into the cupboard, forgotten, until another must-have night.

You’re OK, you tell yourself. You’re used to this. 

And you’re not.

Bodies: a gnarl of women like Guernica forever and ever, arms thrown open exclamations—

Among them, you try to breathe, heart full, your walls grow thinner—

That’s what makes you a good writer—

And in the kitchen, you hold onto the sink. 

Your son taps you: Mom, you’re OK. He’s used to this. 

You’re not.

Sometimes, sometimes there’s nothing—you never know when—

And sleep peels open like soft fruit. Rest takes you.

Dream snakes shy from your touch. Bodies stop asking to be seen and

You wake with the relief of birds at first light.

You’re OK. You’re used to this.

You’re not. But you will be. 

Published in the Horror Writers Association Wellness Committee’s publication, Of Horror and Hope, July 2022. Finalist in the Australian Shadows Award for Poetry.

A New Englander living in Australia for 25 years, Lauren Elise Daniels is an awarded poet, editor, and author. Her novel Serpent’s Wake: A Tale for the Bitten is a Notable Work with the Horror Writers Association’s Mental Health Initiative.

“To all my neighbours” by Celine Murray

To all my neighbours,

If you hear me screaming

Don’t call the police,

I’m just alive

“Maybe paint by numbers will fix me” by Celine Murray

When you’re frozen on the tracks

Between the trolley problem of laundry

And dishes

And dusting

And sleep

And paint by numbers

When mania chases you around the house

And won’t be calmed by your relaxing instrumentals playlist

And you need to make turnovers or the apples will rot

And what do we need from the supermarket?

Text me if you think of anything else

And what if the paint drips on your jeans

And the brush goes stiff

While you unload the laundry

What if your tea goes cold again

And you haven’t sewn that button back on

Or watered the plants

Or activated your library card

Stop! Stop!

Could I just have a minute?

To finish crafting the belief

That I might ever get anything fucking done?

Celine Murray is a queer, disabled, multicultural writer from Aotearoa with a background in short stories and poetry. She has a passion for death and the monstrous and also for tea and embroidery.

“A Candle in the Abyss” by Angela Yuriko Smith

I stand at the edge

of the abyss—dark, cold, lost

with a single flame

to illuminate

the midnight chaos ahead.

Quivering candle

to drive away dark…

it will never be enough

to defeat the night.

I toss my pale light

into the pit where it falls

a wavering star

the ghost of a sun

plummeting past sad faces

I only now see.

Momentary shine

proves I am not all alone

on this precipice.

In absolute dark

a small spark makes a difference.

I strike a new match.

Published in Kraken Fever by Angela Yuriko Smith and Kyra Starr, Yuriko Publishing 2021, p.61. 

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Shimanchu/Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years of newspaper experience. Publisher of Space & Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and an HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.

“Ship of Fools” by Dave Jeffery

Thought: thick, turgid— 

A world of treacle

Through which we wade

The walls, sometimes gossamer 

More often: Perspex, 

Yet we are ever within them,

Incarceration incarnates—

Pinel’s prisoners, now fettered

Within the dungeon of Moral Treatment.

The crime? Defined—

by those who want nothing to do with us,

Yet decide our worth,

Using ignorance as both

Weapon and guide.

We are considered libertine,

So denied liberty,

Afraid this Ship of Fools should run aground,

Corrupting pseudo-reason 

With pseudo-folly. 

Once a hapless tar,

Jack set adrift, 

Now the land-locked leper, 

Throwing dark shapes 

In dim doorways,

And plastic bags and garbage, 

Become company and home, 

Something for

The passers-by to by-pass, 

Lest they question, 

How all this began.

It is not action,

But reaction, 

Honing the ignorance

Of so many, towards so few.

And there is a dawning sadness that: 

Any parity, any semblance of unity 

Bonding outcast to socialite, 

Finds form in fear.

Published in the Horror Writers Association Wellness Committee’s publication, Of Horror and Hope, July 2022, from Finding Jericho by Dave Jeffery, Demain Publishing, 2020.  

Dave Jeffery is the author of 18 novels, two collections, and numerous short stories and poems. Before retiring to write full-time, Jeffery worked in the NHS for 35 years specialising in the field of mental health nursing and risk management. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Mental Health Studies and a Master of Science Degree in Health Studies and is the current HWA Wellness Committee co-chair. 

“I Will Not Stall Time” by Claire Fitzpatrick

I am solitude 

I live within a dream

The shape of happiness

As firm as wildfire trees 

I am tired

Of sleeping in this lonely room

Cocooned within this lonely air

Stifled by silence

I am a deserted city

Of dwindling hope

Within this homeless house

Breathing stale air

I am bending truths

Disguised as pathways

Opaque boundaries 

A hundred thousand sighs 

I am drowned 

I crave warm fingerprints 

Tracing the ventricles

Of my heart

Happiness sends

Droplets 

Down my throat 

Yet I remain parched 

It’s spring 

Yet I am drenched in

Eternal winter 

Frozen to the bone

I’ve reached the zenith 

Sick of pulling teeth

Slicing through apple

Rotten to the core

I’ve reached the pinnacle 

And I will not stall time

Even though I love you

More than you deserve 

I will save the spark 

The once drenched match 

Will strike 

Again

Claire Fitzpatrick is an award-winning speculative fiction author and editor. She’s the current president of the Australasian Horror Writers Association and has two kids, six chickens, and a surprisingly flourishing vegetable garden.

“Regarding Nina Simon’s Bad Reputation” by Sumiko Saulson

How it pained me to see my mother

In all her grace and glory

Baited to make her angry

So she could fit into expectation

As long and lithe as Josephine Baker

As tall and muscular as Grace Jones

How you would fetishize her anger

A proud black goddess magnificent

Black and magnificent was her nickname

Her bearing and conduct intimidatingly same

With a long black cape and a lovely choker

More gothic than any novel by Bram Stoker

Statuesque and dark-skinned like Roxie Roker

She fought to stay whole and so no

Body broke her…

But her fight to stay whole had a price to it

A people saying she was not nice to it

Like Nina Simone, she stood moody, alone

Her mood having no artifice or device to it

My mother bemoaned her choice

A white man married two kids and divorce

My white father stealing her black voice

Black and magnificent was her nickname

She who called herself Krishna

Was one and the same

How hard it is to walk this land

A paler ghost of she…

Who holds her invisible hand

And tries to make her way through,

Win or lose…

And finds herself shod in Mama’s shoes

How thick and wide and fat I am, me

Cast inside your roles of Mammy

Escape we’d love to but, now, can we?

I am too old and fat to run away

From the roles in which you have me enslaved

My mom was Krishna, I am Ska

But to your ass I look like Ma

A caricature in an Octavia Spencer movie

A nutcase like Stephen King’s Mr. Toomey

I thought I was a horror writer

But it seems

I will only ever be

A sassy black woman meme

Your racism sewed up tight

Tattered at the seams

It holds up your privilege white

Makes black folks wrong

And you always right

Nina Simone is dead

but her bad reputation lives on

Bad for being a domestic violence victim

Who held her head up too long

Looked too strong

And showed too much personal pain

In her song

A woman done wrong

But like my Mama

She was Black

So you never see pain

Just drama 

“Surviving” by Sumiko Saulson

Surviving others has a certain weight to it

A palpable heaviness

As though your clothing, tear-dampened

Is bearing down on you with its cloying sway

Pulling you into the floor

When you walk forward, and that grief

Compounded by grief,

Drags at your feet,

Ghosts grabbing your ankles

While you push on through

From the Bram Stoker Award Nominated The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry

Third Place Science Fiction Poetry Association Dwarf Star Award Winner (tie)

“Turbulent Waters” by Sumiko Saulson

Still waters don’t always run deep

Nor are the anxious automatically shallow

But the intense and uptight 

Skiddish and nervous

Have fair weather tendencies

Rarely seen among those

With steel nerves and reserves of patience

Those who crack with every panic attack

Lack

From the Bram Stoker Award Nominated The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry

Sumiko Saulson is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated poet for their 2022 collection The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry (Dooky Zines), and an award-winning author of Afrosurrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror whose latest novel Happiness and Other Diseases is available on Mocha Memoirs Press.

“In The Beginning There Was Bipolar” by Cindy O’Quinn

More often than not she was angry, other times she was low and blue.

I tried to catch her on those in-between days,

on those days she was my sister.

I wished for more days like that,

not the days when she was beyond the black.

Tread lightly until mood was known,

steer clear of the vile tongue and claws that scratch.

It was temporary, I knew she would come back.

Flesh and blood shared, but not mind,

her mind ticked to another mind clock.

Behind the door that didn’t lock,

held my back against it and feet to the wall,

it was all that would separate.

Soon she would enter,

and stand in darkness so dark, not even the shadows came in.

Threats were promises,

and the bruises were real.

Altered state tamed the demons that resided inside.

Rings of smoke circled above,

vultures waited for their slice of life’s pie.

Diagnosis was a lonely road and many years away.

Self-medicate to ease the pain,

keep the beast at bay and prepare to wait.

She was my sister,

and in the beginning there was always bipolar.

“Hollow” by Cindy O’Quinn

I have a hollow feeling inside,

not just a hunger,

that the sadness keeps alive,

but the hollow is now inside

my thoughts as well.

There is something missing

from the shadows of my mind.

The goodness that once 

surely dwelt within

has sought company elsewhere.

From the graveyard of my soul

waits respite from the dark.

Be ever present, 

the sounds of the night,

and lift me again from Death’s dark row.

“–the invisible woman–” by Cindy O’Quinn

i never would have imagined,

not this day and age

that a person could disappear

–just fade away–

but it can and it did,

it happened to me

just that way

–just gone away–

people stopped noticing

but that was okay

those nearest remained

–until that day–

the day eyes stared through me,

conversation veered around me,

and I became the invisible woman

–why stay–

could they remember – anyway

it was easier to go

just continue to fade

–invisible–

i’ll keep being her

the invisible woman they made,

and simply walk away…

“Reflection” by Cindy O’Quinn

I looked into the mirror

out of habit – not vanity

I wondered who I would see.

A woman with familiar eyes

was there,

staring back at me.

There were lines in the mirror

as well as her face.

My eyes could see

past the reflection,

before the decades,

at the person that used to be me.

I touched the reflection

and was completely replaced. 

Cindy’s four poems first published in Return to Graveyard Dust by Cindy O’Quinn, released in 2017 from Goose River Press.

Cindy O’Quinn is an Elgin, Rhysling, and Dwarf Star-nominated poet, and a four-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated writer. She lives in the woods of northern Maine.

“500 POUNDS” by Anton Cancre

He said 

that he once put 500 pounds 

on his shoulders, squatted down 

almost to the point 

that his ass touched the ground, 

then got back up.

I didn’t 

tell him that on most days, 

I go to bed at night and get up 

in the morning, 

knowing full well that an entire day

lies ahead of me.

Instead, 

I smiled. Nodded my head 

and constricted a few facial muscles 

to show I was 

properly astonished and said 

that was awesome.

Anton Cancre’s mother wasn’t really pregnant with them when she went to see The Exorcist, but they tell people that anyways because it sounds cool. Their poetry collections, Meaningless Cycles in a Vicious Glass Prison and This Story Doesn’t End the Way We Want All The Time as well as their nonfiction book about Silent Hill, Nightmares of Blood and Flesh, are available from Dragon’s Roost Press. They’re also a luddite who still has a blogspot website (antoncancre.blogspot.com). Any/All.

“How to Avoid Feeling” by E.F. Schraeder

Once I jumped deep into a safe, dark well,

hid in a shadowy cavern, shivering.

I quieted myself with labels and diagnoses

that made sense of the pulsing panic, chaos, dots of light.

I climbed and scraped a path with bleak, bloody hands

like a terrible shadow, risking the stony climb to flee.

I vanished, barefoot, into the listening heart of trees,

waiting for roots to console the softness of my feet.

I have consumed and denied more or less than I need,

lit fires, burned my crumpled intentions like spells. 

chain smoked my lungs into charcoal,

sliced into muscle with weights and blades,

poured myself into colorful bottles.

plunged fists into crumbling walls,

put life on pause to confirm

there was nothing so terrible as myself.

Alone, I sucked in air thick with sticky silences, moving

like a click beetle convinced I could right myself with twists.

Published in The Price of a Small Hot Fire by E.F Schraeder, Raw Dog Screaming Press, July 2023. p. 24. Reprinted with kind permission from the publisher. 

E.F. Schraeder writes about not quite real worlds. A Rhysling-nominated poet, Schraeder’s work has appeared in journals and anthologies and their full length publications include The Price of a Small Hot Fire (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2023), What Happened Was Impossible (Ghoulish Books, 2023), and other works.

Works Cited

Hovey, R.B., Khayat, V.C, & Eugene Feig, E (2018). Cathartic Poetry: Healing Through Narrative, The Permanente Journal Vol. 22, No. 3. https://www.thepermanentejournal.org/doi/10.7812/TPP/17-196

Wytovich Stephanie M., Conjuring Strength Through Poetry: Battling the Slasher Movie in Your Head, Litreactor, October 22, 2020

Xiang, D.H., Yi, A.M. A Look Back and a Path Forward: Poetry’s Healing Power during the Pandemic. J Med Humanit 41, 603–608 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09657-z

The HWA Mental Health Charter: https://horror.org/mental-health-initiative-charter/